ChrisBaran.net Technology Thoughts

You may have stumbled upon this from this post.  If not and you are trying to figure this out then you are in luck.  I’m going to go through step by step how to figure out a static route for a windows XP VPN client connection.

Step 1: Make the VPN Connection

Setting up and connecting to a VPN in Windows XP is will documented so I’m not going to repeat it in this article.  When you make the VPN connection you should see a two computer blinking screen icon in the system tray:

Step 2: Look Up Client IP

Double click on the icon from step one.  In the window that pops up click the Details tab.  You need to find the address after Client IP address:

Step 3: Look Up Routing Table

Next open a command prompt.  You can find it under Accessories in the start menu:

In the command box type route print.

In the output of route print you should find only 2 lines where the Interface is the address we found in Step 2 and the Metric is 1.  One of those lines starts with 255.255.255.255, this is not the line we want.  We want the line that’s going to start out like the Interface address but end with zeros.  In my screenshot I’ve got the magic line hilighed in green.

A static route would be represented by the Network Destination and the Netmask combination.  You can google for subnet calculator to convert the 255.255.255.0 notation to a number of bits (ie 24 in our example).

Tags: PPTP, VPN, Windows XP

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